Wireless communication systems are constantly under development. Developing systems provide a cost-effective support of high data rates and efficient resource utilization. One communication system under development is the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) Long Term Evolution (LTE). An improved version of the Long Term Evolution radio access system is called LTE-Advanced (LTE-A). The LTE is designed to support various services, such as high-speed data, multimedia unicast and multimedia broadcast services.
One aspect under development is the concept of small cells. It has been proposed that under a macro cell serving a large area there would be a number of smaller cells with local area coverage. The small cells could reduce the power consumption at both base stations and user equipment side, offload traffic from the macro cell, and also potentially enable some new service types in the future.
It has been proposed that the small cells may be similar to Remote Radio Heads (RRH) which operate as individual cells but some of the processing, such as the baseband processing, may be done in a central entity. On the other hand, the small cell nodes may be more independent of the macro node. Thus, all the processing may be done in the small cell nodes but a specified interface may be deployed between a macro node and a small cell node.